What is counselling?

Counselling provides a safe, supportive space to talk about painful feelings and personal issues in a confidential setting. The focus of counselling depends on what is most important for you: it may be an aspect of life you find challenging to deal with alone and would like help to work through. You may be experiencing problems in a relationship and need support and a sense of direction. The emphasis is on helping you find your own answers within a safe and accepting environment.

Counselling helps with allowing and exploring what exists in our internal and external worlds so we can begin to face and work through what is there with a new openness to ourselves and our experience. Talking with someone impartial who listens with understanding and genuinely cares can help us gain clarity and bring us into more expansive, productive places in our lives. Counselling may also provide an opportunity to look at past limiting patterns of relating, helping us understand their influence now and how to change. It may help us grow in understanding of unconscious aspects of ourselves and our relationships, bringing about healing, wholeness and a greater appreciation of ourselves.

Although each person’s process is unique, some of the many benefits of counselling include:

Helping to resolve difficult or overwhelming feelings

Reduced anxiety, stress and inner conflict

Finding ways of coping with depression

Help with relationship or family difficulties

Support in a time of crisis

Support through life changes, ie a new baby, retirement, redundancy, changes in health, loss, bereavement

Finding confidence, increased self-esteem and self-compassion

Shifting ‘stuck’ feelings and situations by exploring choices and decision making

Identifying why the same things keep happening and how to change this

Gaining understanding of ourselves and connections between past and present

Owning, exploring and changing old patterns of thinking, feeling and behaviour